The Crossley ID Guide: Eastern Birds

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Although I own more than 20 field
guides, and have used some of
them until they are falling apart,
you will rarely see me review them in a
limited space where I can only cover eight
books in a year. However useful they
may be, most are boring to write about
and read about. Virtually all follow a formula
invented by Roger Tory Peterson in
A Field Guide to the Birds in the 1930s,
and prefigured by Ernest Thompson
Seton’s black-and-white duck drawings
decades before that: a series of simplified
silhouettes of birds in various plumages,
arranged to compare and contrast.
The formula can work better or be made
harder to use by the ability of the artists.
Although anything accurate is serviceable,
some give more, such as the quirky
portraits by Norman Lighton in the first
edition of Roberts’ Birds of South Africa.
Great artists like Lars Jonsson can make
just looking at their guides a pleasure,
while others—have you ever seen the first
edition of The Birds of Nepal ?—can make
you doubt that any bird ever looked like
that. David Sibley, using both science and
art, probably attained the pinnacle of the
formula. But finally all are more similar
than not.

I had vowed not to review field guides
until something new came along, and now
not one, but two, very different new field
guides have appeared. The one you can’t
avoid is the Crossley—big, bold, ambitious,
brash, and well promoted—but it
really is “something new under the sun.”
Crossley seems to be an extreme version
of the English “twitcher,” in turn a more
extreme version of birder than most of
ours. He is described as “an internationally
acclaimed birder and photographer…
who, by age twenty-one, had hitchhiked
more than 100,000 miles chasing birds
across his native Britain and Europe.” The
book itself is called a “stunningly illustrated
book [that]…revolutionizes birding
by providing the first real-life approach to
identification.” Can any book live up to
such hype?

My answer is a guarded yes. Crossley’s
approach is maximalist, over-the-top, selfpromoting,
and not without humor. It is
also genuinely new, about which I’ll have
more to say in a moment. The book is
huge for a field guide, bigger than the
original Sibley, and may be a bit too big
for the field, though it is perfect for such
things as “car birding” for shorebirds and
waterfowl at refuges. (I’ll doubtless take
one to Bosque del Apache this winter to
show visitors new birds.)

Which leads directly into its greatest
virtues. In the past I have disliked photographic
guides, because they freeze one
individual member of a species in one moment
of its life and do not portray a sort
of Platonic archetype (the exact opposite
of Sibley’s last refinement of the Peterson
school). Crossley uses photographs but
flies right past the problem, assembling
clusters of each species going about their
business against vivid natural or in some
cases human backgrounds (his peregrines
obviously live in New York City, and his
Lesser Scaups on a lake by someone’s summer
house, examples of the whimsy that
leavens his serious ambitions).

I have a few mild reservations. The
technique might not work quite as well
for small forest birds, but small forest
birds are harder to see to start with and
this may merely reflect reality. And I see
little reason for using the four-letter “alpha
code” names that banders use to record
data for a species; it’s irrelevant and
not useful to most birders. But these are
mere quibbles.

The Crossley ID Guide may be most useful
for beginning or inexperienced birders;
more advanced or aged birders like
me may want more taxonomy or subtle
texts like Kenn Kaufman’s Advanced Birding.
But I would buy it for teaching those
beginners and introducing them to identification
at places like Bosque del Apache.
The guide’s jacket copy says Crossley has
multiple projects in the works. I will be
eager to see all of them.